This blog is not affiliated in any way with Cindy Crawford. Even if she is its de facto inspiration. It's also not affiliated in any way with Hayden Panettiere, who's earned joint top billing on this blog because she makes me happy. And that ain't easy.

Sunday, December 04, 2005

So if Jen and Rachel are ever in the UK...

This was in today's Observer by Stonewall's Ben Summerskill. I thought about linking, but I decided to let her and the missus (and other enlightened folks) read the whole thing. Still a long way to go, but it's definitely in the right direction. US Government and most of the rest of the world (except, of course, the countries that did it before this one) take note.For four million gay people in Britain, Christmas comes early this year. From tomorrow, they'll be able to give notice that they intend to register their partnerships at town halls across the country. Then in a fortnight's time, lesbian and gay couples will be exchanging 'I dos' for the first time, not just in register offices but - in happy harmony with the way we live now - in the stately homes of down-at-heel aristocrats and below deck on HMS Belfast, too.For inhabitants of the Westminster beltway, life for gay people might appear to have changed completely in recent years. Since the summer of 2003, four major gay legislative demands have secured passage through a doggedly gay-sceptic House of Lords. The legislative hurly-burly of the past two years is certainly in stark contrast to the one change - on lesbian and gay adoption - that peers had previously grudgingly conceded since 1997.Civil partnership itself, for which Stonewall and others campaigned so hard, is transformative. It will offer gay people every single right, and responsibility, invested in marriage. Even the Slaughterhouse Act 1974 has been assiduously amended by owlish civil servants so that a lesbian might bequeath a slaughterhouse licence to her partner.This time next year gay people will no longer risk resentful families preventing them attending a hospital bedside. And hundreds of thousands of public sector workers will be entitled to leave a survivor pension to their partner, something they've been disgracefully forced to fund in the past without having the opportunity to pass on the benefit.The Economist acknowledges that civil partnership will be dubbed 'gay marriage'. In practical terms, it will mean 'Elton and David get wed' headlines and Auntie Maureen and Uncle Fred attending their gay nephew's wedding reception.It will also represent a world-class challenge to the 'hetero-normativity' bemoaned plaintively by sociologists for 30 years. For while Britain's wider population might have disobligingly resisted academic entreaties to challenge their own 'hetero-normativity', they do fully understand that if their cousin, son, auntie or schoolmate wants to have a wedding list at Debenhams and a honeymoon in the Maldives, it makes them pretty much the same as everyone else. Most important of all, introduction of civil partnership gives a message to a generation of young lesbians and gay men, and generations to come, that one day they will be entitled to the same respect and fair treatment as their heterosexual counterparts.A stark corrective to the idea popular among some liberal intelligentsia that Britain has completely changed for the better as far as 'gay stuff' goes was the killing of Jody Dobrowski on Clapham Common six weeks ago. Too shy and embarrassed even to visit a gay bar, the 24-year-old was kicked to a slow death to reported chants of homophobic abuse.Campaigners at Stonewall are only too aware that changing the law, tough though it might be, is really just the easy part. Changing the world is tougher still. And if you remain unconvinced that there's still a problem, just visit any school playground in Britain. The insult 'gay' is in common usage, even in primary schools. Lesbian and gay 16-year-olds with good GCSE results are more likely to leave school at 16 than their heterosexual counterparts, compromising their life chances. And confidence that the bullying which causes this will be addressed is scarcely enhanced by the knowledge that Ruth Kelly, cabinet minister in charge of our schools, voted against equality for gay people in the last parliament.In the media too, lesbians and gay men remain almost invisible. And when they do crop up, as EastEnders demonstrated only last week, it is as lurid stereotypes. The BBC1 soap might have made ground-breaking history almost two decades ago when Colin pecked Barry on the cheek. But sensible Sonia's innocent peck from Naomi last Monday night apparently left Sonia so traumatised that she instantly jumped into bed with her virtually estranged vegetable of a husband. It would warm the cockles of prudish Lord Reith's heart.He would undoubtedly also take comfort from the noisy opposition to gay equality still coming from some parts of the British establishment. Friday's Daily Telegraph duly featured a bitter polemic against civil partnership from 'Why-oh-Why' columnist Ferdinand Mount. Ferdie's principal complaint seemed to be that the Islington Council registrar who will soon host a ceremony between Sir Anthony Sher and his partner is exactly the same one who recently married Ferdie's beloved daughter.Standing shoulder to shoulder alongside Mr Mount is the Daily Mail'sMelanie Phillips, one of the trenchant campaigners for 'family values' who seem - distressingly for so many - to have lost the argument. The Office of National Statistics reported recently that it expected the number of unmarried people in Britain to outnumber the married for the first time by 2030.Not that heterosexuals necessarily make a good advert for marriage. As a tabloid journalist, Melanie might be acquainted with the personal excitements of pop singer Britney Spears. Britney was for years a pin-up of neo-cons worldwide as an exemplar of their beloved abstinence before marriage. Even George Bush cited the singer as a role model for American youth.Last year the star - who had actually been having intimate relations with fellow popster Justin Timberlake while being feted against her will as a teen-virgin - did demonstrate devotion of a sort to marriage, by getting heroically drunk one night and marrying a casual acquaintance - not Mr Timberlake - in a Las Vegas wedding chapel. Britney demonstrated an equally heroic penitence by getting divorced the next morning.The columnists may bark, but the caravan of 21st-century Britain moves on. Perhaps one happy outcome of Stonewall's campaign for civil partnership has been the message it's given to a government all too often over-anxious about social reform. The roof has not fallen in, politically or socially. And it won't fall in tomorrow morning either.For while politicians and so-called faith leaders might fret about an orgiastic decline in traditional values, this weekend, Auntie Maureen and Uncle Fred are cheerily awaiting an entirely unforeseen, and much welcome, postal delivery from their distant relatives. A clutch of wedding invitations.

The James Horner Spot.

The Tell Them Who I Am Spot.

...is a 43-year-old guy who likes listening to film and TV music, whose days of eating entire packets of biscuits are gone thanks to the ol' diabetes, whose hair - thanks to genetics - now has a bald spot on top but who is fortunately 6'2" so it's hard to see, who enjoys the box (particularly American shows - and the often-made British claim that "we only see the best of US TV" is a fallacy as anyone who has cable will testify. I think it's Americans who only see the best of Br... I hate that term, so I refuse to sully this blog with it), who's gotten most of his friends through stories and the net, who loves writing about attractive female celebrities, who slaves at a direct mail company, and who isn't as sorry he grew up in Barbados between 1976 and 1993 as he used to be. Oh, and he doesn't seem any emotionally different from when he was 12. A man really is a child grown up, child is father of the man, and so on...